With this year’s incredible line-up of activities, we know you won’t want to miss a thing. But in case you do, 7a*11d offers a festival “blog” with daily critical commentary (description, introspection, cultural implication, and maybe just a tad of gossip...) and interviews with participating artists by selected local writers. Our 2010 edition features the commentaries of Natalie Loveless and Daniel Baird.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Glenn Lewis' Creative Sweeping: Part 2 (EW)

Despite the spattering rain and the wet sidewalks, Glenn Lewis performed the second of his Sweeping Statement walks this afternoon. The streets were cleaner today, and cleared of most of the fallen leaves -- in fact we encountered another sweeper (our third in as many hours!) today, forcing Lewis to be more creative with his garbage collection.

He spent a lot more time this walk negotiating barriers: searching through fences, under awnings and chains, into construction sites, beneath hotel steps, in decaying flower beds and even into recycling bins. The greatest physical barrier that presented itself was the sidewalk closure outside the Art Gallery of Ontario, causing Lewis to squeeze between concrete barriers and whirring traffic. But the sidewalks were sometimes just as difficult to traverse, Lewis' dustbin competed with baby carriages, pull carts and trolleys for real estate on the concrete.

In addition to increased resourcefulness, Lewis also took the name on the back of his jumpsuit (HOPE Engineering) to heart, showing the streets and all their inhabitants compassion. When he swept up sandwich wrappers, he would leave the stale food behind, offering it to rummaging pigeons; he stopped his walk several times to drop change into the cups of the homeless; he went out of his way to help people dispose of the garbage still in their hands.

Watching the expressions of passersby was particularly interesting. Most were unfazed by the events of the performance and continued on with their daily lives without even realizing Lewis was there. After all, though a little incongruous with his surroundings, a sanitation worker is hardly the most curious thing on the streets, especially given the number of them we have see so far. We did get significant portion of puzzled glances (most likely due to the valiant efforts of videography duo Annie Onyi Chung and Patrick Joseph Mifsud who doggedly trundled behind Lewis in a wheelchair-turned-camera dolly). Even fewer still were genuine smiles, although he did strike up the occasional conversation, and some people cheerfully donated the garbage they had on hand.

Photos (above) of Glenn Lewis by Henry Chan.

Returning to Queen and Dalhousie with a full container of somewhat soggy trash, Lewis had successfully collected enough material to begin work on the Abyssinian sanctuary that will showcase both the artifacts that he has recovered as well as the video diptych of the walks themselves, prepared by Chung and Mifsud. Stay tuned for Lewis' final performance at the Toronto Free Gallery on Saturday November 1st.

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Our writers...

2010

Natalie Loveless is an artist, teacher and writer. She recently completed a PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz, on transdiciplinarity and its implications for new models of pedagogy and socially engaged art practices. She is a visiting assistant professor in the Visual Arts Department of the University of Western Ontario and is on the editorial board of >> liminal << the journal of new performance. Natalie's blog posts are marked '(NL)'.

Born in Los Angeles, Daniel Baird lived and worked in New York City from 1989, where he was a founder of The Brooklyn Rail, a magazine for which he worked as an art editor, feature writer, and monthly columnist. Since moving to Toronto in 2000, he has written on the arts for numerous Canadian publications, including Canadian Art and Border Crossings. He is the former editor of The Walrus, and remains a regular contributor on topics as diverse as contemporary art and history, political theory and religion. Daniel's blog posts are marked '(DB)'.

Writers 2008

Andrew James Paterson is an interdisciplinary artist working with video, film, performance, writing, publishing, and music. He has presented and performed work locally, nationally, and internationally. His body of work has been characterized by a fascination with relationships between bureaucracy, technology, and bodies. Dynamics between performers and audiences has been another recurring obsession. Paterson performed in the first two 7a*11d festivals, and has been an enthusiastic observer at all of the others.

Elaine Wong, a recent graduate of McMaster University, has been involved in theatre production for eight years, and has been writing for even longer. Her most recent effort combining the two was the play she co-wrote for the McMaster Honours Performance Series, 16 Stunning Storeys from the City Streets, a piece examining the definition of street art and audience interaction.